


I Think We're Doing Pretty Good

by Leidolette



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-07
Updated: 2015-11-07
Packaged: 2018-04-29 01:24:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5111219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leidolette/pseuds/Leidolette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jade and Dave grew up and stayed ridiculous.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Think We're Doing Pretty Good

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zhansonic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zhansonic/gifts).



The lighting is perfect. The camera is set at just the right angle.

"And... action!" Dave says.

Unsurprisingly, the 120 million year old fossilized crocodile jaw bones do not respond. What a bunch of amateurs.

Welp, good thing Dave is a consummate professional, and he dutifully takes shot after shot of the fossils from every angle, including several shots to establish scale, before he catalogs it and moved on to the next specimen.

Dave had just returned from a long stint in the field a little over a week ago and he is still measuring items and logging reams of data about every piece that his team had brought back to the university museum office that serves as his base of operations if he isn't in rural Utah, or some frozen clearing five hours north of Calgary, or wherever his research ends up taking him. Between all the work that needs to be done on the new samples and the paperwork that he has been putting off for weeks now, Dave had been spending some late nights at the museum with only the displays of gigantic tree rings and the taxidermied marmots for company.

But despite the pile of grant proposals that are moldering on his makeshift desk, Dave feels absolutely damn fine. And for one reason: Jade is back in town.

She'd gotten in this morning from some top secret location, after working on some top secret project for weeks. She always was a little wild when she came home from these trips -- Dave had caught her muttering about multi-dimensional, experimental nuclear physics in the shower more than once.

Occasionally, after a little prodding from Dave, even Jade has to admit her life sometimes resembled that of a supervillian's.

At five, Dave speedwalks out the doors and into the parking lot as fast as he can without looking like a idiot and heads home where he knows that Jade's waiting. (Or, more likely, going through all the music files on his computer to see what new stuff he came up with while she was away.)

Paleontologists aren't exactly raking in the dough, but Dave has a nice one room apartment downtown. He hasn't had the place long; they move around a lot. Well, Dave moves around a lot and Jade bounces around from her Island, to his apartment, to some secret government lab, to a spot halfway around the world. Frankly, even between the two of them the apartment is empty a lot of the time.

When he walks through his apartment door, one deep breath tells him that Jade isn't placidly waiting for him or rooting through his stuff -- she's cooking dinner. Fried rice, by the smell of it.

Dave drops all his work crap by the door and wastes no time coming up behind Jade at the stove and wrapping his harms around her while nuzzling his nose into the back of her neck. He doesn't let go when she laughs and says that he is making her drop rice all over the stove.

Call him needy. Call him clingy. So what.

"Missed you," he says into the back of her head, emotion making his words brief, for once.

"Missed you too, duh," Jade says back, and then they enthusiastically (and a little sloppily) makeout while everything on the stove almost gets burnt beyond saving.

After, while he's still waiting for dinner, Dave goes through the mail that had piled up in their box, and was surprised to find something that actually looks important.

"Hey, there's something from your work here."

"Oh yeah, I think it's a tax thing. Can you stick it in the file with everything else?"

Dave winced internally and threw it in the horribly-organized tax drawer, and resolved it completely ignore it for the next couple months. Doing their taxes was an absolute shitshow that even some sort of feces-based, Ringling Brothers Circus would be hard pressed to beat. When your non-citizen wife earns half her income on an unnamed, uncharted island that doesn't officially exist, paperwork can get complicated. You'd think that Jade being a for-real-no-shit genius means that he can just pawn all this work off to her, but last time he did that they got audited.

"Oh, hey, can you do me a favor and feed Bec?" Jade asks distractedly as she's putting the finishing touches on the meal.

"Jade, that is the worst thing you could ever ask me to do," Dave says, deadpan.

"Not even close!"

"Jade, you know I love you more than life itself, but I want you to know that I'm currently filing for divorce and hiding all our mad assets in a secret bank account so I can escape from this city and never see your awful animal ever again."

"Maybe I've stolen everything first, hmmm?" she says cheerfully.

"Fine, I'd rather be on the street at the mercy of the various roving gangs of rats that rule the gutters than deal with the creature again," he declares, but took the thick cut of raw steak that Jade held out to him anyways.

Dave's protests are only partly for show, Bec still does make all the hair stand up on the back of Dave's neck whenever the dog (or, alleged "dog", in Dave's opinion) gets excited and starts teleporting all around Dave's general vicinity. And that beast sure does love his glowy steaks, so he is bound to get worked up and zappy when Dave walks in with his dinner.

Fortunately, it is pretty easy to feed him. Steak in the irradiator; irradiator dings; Dave grabs the hunk of meat that is probably giving him radiation poisoning; and then he brings it up on the roof and tosses it, where a white blur grabs it out of mid-air and disappears again.

Dave looks around on the roof and sees no sign of Bec. Great. That means the beast is just going to lurking around unseen then.

It's shocking how warm the bed feels when they go to bed that night. Right before he drifts off, he drowsily reaches over to her pillow. Her long hair slides through his fingers, and it's like some agitated thing calmed down inside. This is home. He is home.

It's the easiest thing in the world to fall asleep that night.

\-----

Dave wakes up alone the next morning. It should be normal; he sleeps alone when he's in the field, like he is a lot of the year. But one day back with Jade and his body has already attuned to her presence -- he expects her.

Well, that's not so bad. In fact, it's pretty fucking fantastic if the glow in his chest that he gets sometimes when he thinks about her is any indication.

It takes a couple minutes to force himself out of bed. But when he does, on his bare kitchen table (which he hasn't even had time to get cluttered yet), he sees a note:

Dave considers telling John anyways, he has contrary streak in him that rears its head every now and them. He wonders if he could convince John that some sort of nuclear zombie apocalypse scenario is secretly happening _a la_ Dawn of the Dead and they're just in the first ten minutes of the movie when no one knows yet.

But he doesn't. Instead he gets up and eats a bowl of leftover fried rice from last night and waits for Jade to come home again. He doesn't mind.

Jade calls a couple hours later explaining that it was just a minor nuclear breach and that she should be home for lunch. "Hope you're in the mood for burritos!"

Dave thinks that life could definitely be worse.


End file.
